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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Since Livedrive.com is extremely heavy-handed with the censoring on their web forums it appears I have to resort to blogging and using Google index results to get answers to some of my problems. Overall I’m a huge fan of the software. It’s great! Their support however, is lacking. I’ve found most often in the past that a properly keyword-laden blog post on Google’s servers often gets immediate results from the Internet community since Google will index my search terms with words like “LiveDrive.com and Support and Problems.”

Support Forums:

If you’re going to have support forums for users thats hidden from the general public then it’s general practice to have them be a place for open-ended discussion and troubleshooting of problems. What else would we be there for? Do you just sort through the “oh I love your product” posts and allow those to be posted to falsely inflate your product’s apparent quality? I’ll admit I used the forums when deciding to try the product, and after reading many rave reviews, decided to pay my substantial fee to become a member. I didn’t know you pruned all the negative publicity out of them before allowing users to see them.

Instead the staff at LD require moderator approval for every post, so it’s hours (and sometime over a day) before your post gets published, if at all. I personally have three posts to the boards, all urgent in nature, which required quick corrective action on my part before I could continue, none of which were approved by moderators, the most recent of which concerned an email archiving issue. (See Email Support issue mentioned below)

Here is their policy notice about the forums:

Bullet points 1 through 3 I can agree with.

Bullet point 4 suggests that you know better than we do whether you are able to answer our questions better than a community member. Well, if you had a phone number we could call in the US, I’d be ok with that. I even made the international call to London not once but three times yesterday, only to receive voicemail each time with no option to speak to a technician.

Bullet point 5 just seems completely rude. It’s a forum… a place for us to ask questions, primarily from each other, and to compare notes and troubleshoot problems. That is in essence why you put it in the “help” section of your website I assume?

In point of face your “Help page” says:

So now you’re even filtering what we communicate with other users about? That seems a little ridiculous don’t you think. I know you’re not a US based company so I can’t tout my “freedom of speech” card or anything, nor would I want to, however I do expect to be able to find a faster way of getting support than your standard email delays from your support department.

Email Support Issue:

I purchased the largest package you offer, and my “Service and Support” guarantee on your website offers “24 hour priority same day e-mail support” as part of my purchase.

Example 1:

I filed a support ticket #163907 on 1/24/11 at 1:20 PM.

I received an email 4 minutes later with the following:

This message has been automatically generated in response to the creation of a support request regarding: -

"Subject Removed"

There is no need to reply to this message right now. Your support ticket has been assigned a Ticket ID of [livedrivesupport.com #163907].

If you wish to contact us again regarding "Subject Removed" please include the string: -

[livedrivesupport.com #163907]

in the subject line of all future correspondence.”

I never received ANY response from support on the issue and this has been almost 75 days since I opened the ticket.

Example 2:

I filed my 4th support ticked on 3/16/2011 at 2:17PM through their “Support” button on the program interface.

Here is the screenshot of my email records to document that I’m not fabricating this: (Click the image to blow it up for further examination of the timestamps)

My FIRST response from the staff at LiveDrive.com was a full FIVE days later. To his credit, he answered my question with his email and it wasn’t a critical issue, but was causing a problem with a client computer and I was stuck on that issue until I received his response. So.. 24 hour priority same day support huh? Umm.. not so far.

Back to my current problem 4gb filesize limitations?

Now, the 4gb filesize limitation I was originally trying to politely post on the forum, which never got approved, and which I am now forced to put here on the blog.

Problem Description:

I have an outlook PST archive file titled Exchange Archive All.pst, which as you would imagine is just that… an offline archive of some of my old emails that aren’t really needed everyday, but might need to be referenced in the future. This email archive goes back almost 10 years. I’ve been archiving this via external USB drive for years now just as a preventative backup in case my original got infected, corrupted, or otherwise became inaccessible. One of the great things about LD is the ability to backup endless amounts of data, so I was very glad to know my outlook archive would have a home in the cloud, safe from damage.

The other day I went to open the file and was greeted with an error. Hmm.. that’s not likely for me, so I try again with the same result. Curious but not supremely worried, I navigate to my email backup directory on my computer and see the following.

If you notice the highlighted file, you’ll see it’s listed as 4,194,304 kilobytes in size. That is unnatural and extremely unlikely for two reasons.

4,194,304 kb is EXACTLY 4.00 gigabytes.

It is unlikely that I could create a 4.00gb outlook archive on purpose if I tried! It’s too perfectly random of a number.

My suspicion is that the storage media Livedrive.com is providing is formatted FAT32, which can’t possibly process data over 4gb, so the file on my computer got truncated during it’s upload to the backup server and reduced to 4.00 gb, the maximum allowed on their servers. I’ve been unable to determine this as fast since they won’t approve my posts on the forums and therefore I can’t ask my other peers if they have ever experienced a 4gb limitation on their file sizes.

Secondly I do this for a living, so I KNOW the only thing that’s changed on this target computer is the addition of LD in recent months. Today I went and restored the last backup I’d made off my USB media. The screenshot below shows the actual filesize, as it’s supposed to be.

You can see from the backup folder that the original filesize was supposed to be 5.685 gigabytes. I copied the old file back over to my computer and as suspected it’s working fine now.

So, my question for LiveDrive.Com support is this: Is there a 4gb filesize limitation on files uploaded through your system? Please advise…

Sunday, April 03, 2011

Wow it’s been a busy couple of days, at least those I’ve been home. For three days before leaving for Denver and for three days since I’ve been back I’ve been constantly getting the garden ready for this year. Those of you who know me know I’ve always wanted a “real” garden and it looks like this year I’m going to have the space and time to devote to it.

The neighbor behind us has about 3 to 4 acres that abuts our property and he only uses it for hay for his horses. He offered to plow me some of his field for garden if I wanted it and I jumped on the idea. I’ve been patiently waiting for about six months for planting time to arrive and now its just about here.

One thing I’ve learned so far this season, though its only just begun, is a huge respect for gardeners of years past who did everything on their own with no machinery. Everything I’ve done thus far this year has been completely by hand and my garden is extremely small compared to others and hand-tilling this will wear you out! Stanly county soil is thick red clay, so thick it often clumps so tight you can mistake it for stone. I’ve had to hand-crush all the clumps, mix about a thousand pounds of clay with 500 pounds of potting soil, and added osmocote to the mix as a booster. Just the rose garden took me almost three days to complete and it’s only 18 feet long.

The newest addition: Herb Garden.

Little ideas here and there have led me to more and more work, two solid days of which resulted in me getting Amy’s herb garden designed and built. After building the first part of it today she’s decided she wants to double it and put one on the other side of the patio, so I’ll get to work on that in the next couple of days. First she decided she wanted it twice as tall. Now she wants two of them! lol. It’s work but I love woodworking and I love gardening, so I certainly enjoy combining the two, especially when it’s stuff she wants!

The picture here is a raised bed I built for a total of about $40.00 in materials. I’d highly suggest building your own over purchasing pre-built beds. It just makes no sense to spend that kind of money when you can do this in an afternoon. This one is 1 foot tall, 12 feet long, L shaped, and 18 inches wide.

The next project is one just like it with a bench in the middle that will go across the patio from this one.

This weekend I laid in the herbs that are already potted and ready to go. This bed you see here (above) has Lavender,rosemary, peppermint, sage, oregano, Strawberries (cause I really wanted at least ONE strawberry plant) and two kinds of peppers so Amy and Jordan can make their Salsa-Verde they like so much.

The garden thus far this year:

The next obstacle to tackle is the seed germination for the vegetable garden and for the other herb garden, all of which I seeded tonight. I sorted, catalogued, and started 144 new plants, all of which will go in the ground within the coming month. I’m cataloguing these below for my own reference so I’ll know what’s what when its time to transfer them.

Tray 1:

6 Cherry Tomatoes

6 Beefsteak Tomatoes

10 Okra

4 Giant Watermelon

6 Crimson Sweet Watermelons

4 Jubilee Watermelons

12 Sugar Baby Watermelons

6 Jalapeno Peppers

6 Tendergreen Cucumbers

6 Boston Pickling Cucumbers

6 Straight 8” Cucumbers

6 Zucchini Squash

Tray 2

18 Giant Speckled Pole Beans

8 Cowpeas

6 Thorogreen Bush Lima Beans

6 California Wonder Bell Pellers

6 Straightneck Squash

6 Basil

6 Coreander

6 Parsley

6 Early Summer Crookneck Squash

6 Dill Bouquet

Tomorrow I’ve got two quotes to work on for customers, 1 project to schedule, and then I’m off to find a place to hunt down some bamboo so I can work up my idea for bean poles, then I’m off to Lowe’s for more lumber for my wife’s herb garden/bench. Oi! Ok, back to work.